Technical Field
The instant disclosure generally relates to data management and, in particular, to methods for maintaining the integrity of content stored on devices on-board vehicles, such as aircraft.
Background
Hard disk drives or solid state drives on-board vehicles, such as aircraft, are often housed in a harsh environment. For example, an aircraft can lose power momentarily when pushing back from a gate or when arriving at a gate because of a switch between ground power (e.g., provided by a ground power unit) and aircraft power (e.g., provided by power sources on the aircraft). This switching of power sources or total loss of power can damage drives on-board the aircraft resulting in a loss of data, such as a loss of content (movies, music, etc.) to be distributed to passengers on the aircraft.
Most disk drives go through read and write cycles, and a loss of power to a disk, especially during a write cycle can corrupt the disk. Power on-board vehicles is not predictable, and, thus, corruption or damage to disks is likely. Operating systems and disk utilities can attempt to “recover” a damaged disk (e.g., via repairing partition tables or recovering portions of damaged files). However, the integrity (e.g., presence and accessibility) of individual portions of content may be unknown. To ensure the integrity of content on a corrupted disk, duplicate or replacement files may need to be transferred to the disk, or the disk may need to be physically replaced. Such processes can be costly, both in terms of finances and data communications.